The Paul Taylor Dance Company returns to DANCE IN AMERICA with a bravura one-hour program featuring two contrasting works. Inspired by the Great Depression, "Black Tuesday" recalls an era when Hollywood movies and popular music offered a glamorous antidote to the hard times facing America. Referring to popular period dance forms and performed to Tin Pan Alley songs of the era, the work reflects the harsh reality and escapism of the times in alternately grim and optimistic terms. "Promethean Fire" has been greeted with rave reviews and audience ovations, with some critics conjecturing that the piece represents Taylor's response to September 11. "It has grandeur, majesty and a spiritual dimension ... quite simply one of the best dance works choreographed by Paul Taylor," wrote THE NEW YORK TIMES.

According to weather reports, tonight sounds like a good evening to tend the home fires — and just the time to see two recent dances by master choreographer Paul Taylor premiering on PBS at 10. "Act of Ardor: Two Dances by Paul Taylor" shows the master choreographer at the top of his form. "Black Tuesday" is a penetrating look at the Great Depression using vaudeville routines, slapstick and popular dancers of the day as the basis for its inventive movement. The choreographer transforms this material in vignettes of down-and-outers and survivors that capture an unsettling mix of defiance, biting humor, clowning camaraderie and despair... "Promethean Fire," however, is a more difficult challenge for a filmmaker. It's one of Mr. Taylor's grandest compositions, and it's astounding to see such undiminished creativity from an artist after more than four decades of great dance-making. The problem was how to capture the sense of driving energy Mr. Taylor has mounted in this heroic work set to a monumental Bach score. No small-screen viewing can possibly replicate the huge impact of the dance onstage, but the camera's eye still brings plenty to treasure.

The world premiere of Le Grand Puppetier is not the first time Paul Taylor has used a Stravinsky score for his own idiosyncratic version of a famous ballet, even though he rarely echoes the original in storyline or choreography.

At the end of "In the Beginning," Paul Taylor's screwball-comedy take on the Book of Genesis, an angry Jehovah turns into a forgiving God. Mr. Taylor can be pardoned for "In the Beginning," the New York premiere that the Paul Taylor Dance Company presented on Wednesday night at City Center. It is hardly a masterpiece: it lacks depth but is a whimsical diversion.

Sad in the revival of "Sunset" and funny in last year's "Dream Girls," Paul Taylor seems in full Janus mode in these two pieces, part of the latest program in the Paul Taylor Dance Company's season at City Center.

Yet ambiguity is Mr. Taylor's middle name, and it is just as easy to read a bittersweet happiness into "Sunset" as it is to ponder the existential loneliness under the comic veneer of "Dream Girls."

In his formidable 1980 Sacre du Printemps, Paul Taylor cocked an astute eye at the Diaghilev era of ballet history, the theme of sacrifice, and the lives of dancers. In 2004's Le Grand Puppetier, he mines the Ballets Russes again...

Taylor’s Jumping-Off Places: Revivals and Playful Premieres by Robert Gottlieb for The New York Observer

Every year, it seems, when the Paul Taylor Dance Company steps out at the City Center, at least one work from the past reasserts itself as especially masterly. Last year it was the pastoral Images. This year it’s Mercuric Tidings, Taylor’s glorious outburst of kinetic excitement to excerpts from Schubert’s first and second symphonies.

Choreographer Taylor reworks 'Petrouchka' By FREDERICK M. WINSHIP for UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL

NEW YORK, March 14 (UPI) -- As a prelude to its 50th anniversary tour of all 50 states, the Paul Taylor Dance company is presenting a two-week New York season at City Center that includes the world premiere of Taylor's version of Igor Stravinsky's "Petrouchka," the choreographer's 120th work for the stage.

Re-titled "Le Grand Puppetier" (The Great Puppeteer), Stravinsky's tragic love story of three puppets at a Russian fair -- the hapless Petrouchka, a beautiful Ballerina, and a jealous Moor -- has been changed into a Napoleonic political fable demonstrating that absolute power corrupts absolutely.

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